Marshall Keeble (1878-1968), born to former
slaves near Murfreesboro, Tennessee, became in
time the most successful evangelist among Churches of Christ, baptizing
converts in the tens of
thousands. As a youth with a seventh-grade education, Keeble labored in
a soap factory until he
married Minnie Womack, a daughter of S W Womack, a minister of Churches
of Christ, and the
newly married couple opened a grocery store in Nashville. Under the
tutelage of his wife and his
father-in-law, Keeble began preaching in Nashville churches by 1897 and
by 1914 was traveling
on his own as an itinerant evangelist while his wife minded the store.
In 1918 Keeble planted a church at Oak Grove, near Henderson,
Tennessee, baptizing 84
persons and coming to the attention of Nicholas Brodie Hardeman,
influential president of the
local Freed-Hardeman College. From 1920 until his death Keeble traveled
throughout the
American South and, ultimately, worldwide at the expense of Nashville
millionaire Andrew
Mizell Burton, baptizing hundreds yearly. In 1931, at the depth of the
American economic
Depression and the peak of his powers as a preacher, Keeble brought
1,071 blacks and an untold
number of whites to decisions that resulted in baptism. In that year
Keeble preached in 14
campaigns, establishing six new churches. In Bradenton, Florida, Keeble
and his helpers baptized
115 persons in one day, and a total of 286 during that campaign.
Keeble's 1931 sermons in
Valdosta, Georgia—where 166 were baptized—were recorded by
stenographers, and the transcripts
became the basis of a slender volume edited by another influential
patron, Benton Cordell
Goodpasture.
After 1942 Keeble was nominally president of Nashville Christian
Institute, a segregated private
academy primarily designed to educate young blacks for ministry and
evangelism. He traveled
extensively in the company of young "preacher boys," evangelizing and
raising money for the
school. His fees for preaching were paid directly to NCI, since A M
Burton provided Keeble's
salary and expenses. From 1939 to 1950 Keeble was also the nominal
editor of Christian
Counselor, a monthly journal published by Gospel Advocate Company.
Both the school and the
journal were projected, at least in part, by the Nashville white
establishment to offset the
independent efforts of George Philip Bowser. The journal failed in its
mission, but did not cease
publication until Bowser was dead. NCI continued until desegregation
and the civil rights
movement had made it an anachronism; it closed in 1967, less than a
year before Keeble's death.
From the beginning of his career Keeble proved a master of the English
Bible and human
psychology, by his own account finding in Booker T Washington a primary
role model. Keeble's
relations with his white patrons, who plainly sought to use him as an
instrument of social control,
were inevitably laden with ambiguity. He did not simply tell white
folks what they wanted to
hear. Keeble was, rather, the first evangelist among Churches of Christ
to transcend the
twentieth-century "color line," and very nearly the last. He spoke
often in homespun "parables"
that communicated to blacks quite differently than to whites, but
ultimately Keeble
communicated "good news" to blacks and whites alike.
White contemporaries and hagiographers have often eulogized Keeble's
"humility," but few of
them have understood it for what it is. Keeble's humility is genuine,
but it is founded on the
bravado of Brother Rabbit, who in countless slave tales outwits the Fox
and the Bear by pitting
his weakness against their strength. No one in his time and place
possesses more formidable
psychological and rhetorical weapons than Keeble, or wields them more
effectively.
Keeble enjoyed the patronage of the powerful, and he radiated joy in
his life and work, but he did
not escape the suffering promised to those who proclaim God's good news
in every age or the
humiliation imposed on every American of African descent in his time
and place. He preached
with guns pointed at his head and while being struck with brass
knuckles and rocks, never
dropping a syllable—and, as one envious white contemporary famously
remarked, "Keeble
preached it hard." He did not dispense the soothing potions
of professional pastors, but as a
contentious evangelist in a cauldron of competition he poured out
polemic in an ever-rolling
stream. Contemptuous of unimmersed faith, Keeble never missed an
opportunity to champion the
value of burial in water over what he called "dry cleaning." "The devil
wants you dry," he told
his audiences, "so you'll burn better." Keeble believed fervently and
proved repeatedly that there
was no argument that he and the Bible could not win. "The Bible is
right!" he declared, and he
left no room for doubt that he was on the Bible's side. Yet Keeble
delivered his hard,
uncompromising message with elegant wit and unalloyed love; his
"parables," carefully couched
in the images and idioms of his audiences, conveyed his practical
guidance for everyday life and
his truly evangelical call to share in the hope of heaven.
Faith, hope, and love sustained him in a long life. Keeble buried his
first wife and all five of his
children. He suffered every kind of indignity, insult, and injury.
Racists, in and out of the church,
did not deter him, but neither did he resist them directly. When Keeble
died, two weeks after the
assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, many of his white eulogists
offered invidious
comparisons between Keeble and King. Yet one of his "preacher boys,"
Fred D Gray, inspired by
Keeble's preaching and example, had by then become the attorney who
overturned de jure
segregation and discrimination in the American South, representing Rosa
Parks, King, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and many other activists and
causes in the civil rights
struggle. Keeble himself enjoyed the new privileges and personal
freedoms that civil rights
agitation had brought, but he had lived on earth as a stranger and an
exile, in search of that
"better country, a heavenly one," hoping to bring others along.
Bibliography:
Biography and Sermons of Marshall Keeble, ed by B
C
Goodpasture (Nashville:
Gospel Advocate, 1931);
Julian E Choate, Roll Jordan Roll: A Biography of Marshall Keeble
(Nashville: Gospel Advocate, 1968);
Willie T Cato, His Hand and Heart: The Wit and Wisdom
of Marshall Keeble (Winona MS: J C Choate Publications, 1990);
Forrest Neil Rhodes, "A Study
of the Sources of Marshall Keeble's Effectiveness as a Preacher,"
unpublished PhD dissertation,
Southern Illinois University, 1970.
Don Haymes